Paul Lauritzen

What price parenthood

Current reproductive technology challenges us to think seriously about social values surrounding childbearing. Thoughtful discussion must combine careful attention to the experience of pursuing parenthood by technological means with principled reflection on the morality of this pursuit.

Stem Cells, Biotechnology, and Human Rights: Implications for a Posthuman Future

Successful stem cell therapies might change the natural contours of human life. If that happened, it would unsettle our ethical commitments and encourage us to see the entire natural world merely as material to be manipulated.

Technology and Wholeness: Oncofertility and Catholic Tradition

The remarkable scientific work on fertility preservation that is documented in the early chapters of this volume will inevitably give rise to moral and religious questions about the use of technology to reproduce. In this regard, oncofertility is no different from other forms of assisted reproduction that have led to extensive debate among ethicists and moral theologians. In the case of many forms of reproductive technology, the ethical debate followed rather than preceded the widespread adoption of new techniques in a clinical context. It is thus both notable and commendable that the oncofertility research community seeks to explore the broad implications of oncofertility techniques before they are used widely among cancer patients.

Oncofertility and the Boundaries of Moral Reflection

Advances in medical technology provide regular opportunities to explore theological reflection and magisterial teaching at the border of science and conscience. This article reflects on one such advance involving fertility preservation for cancer patients. The authors argue that ovarian tissue transplantation (OTT) poses intriguing questions for Catholic teaching and theologians about reproductive technology.

Whose Bodies? Which Selves? Appeals to Embodiment in Assessments of Reproductive Technology

This passage from Gena Corea’s book, The Mother Machine typifies the reaction of one important strand of feminist thought to the new technologies of reproduction and birth. It is fairly representative, for example, of the grave suspicion with which feminists associated with FINRRAGE (Feminists International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) have greeted such possibilities as in vitro fertilization, embryo flushing and transfer, and gene therapy. According to this general line of thinking, the new reproductive technologies should be resisted because they concentrate power in the hands of a predominantly male and patriarchal medical establishment by disembodying procreation. By separating procreation from women’s bodies, reproductive technology simultaneously reduces women to bodies, or body parts, and strips women of one traditional source of power, namely, the power to procreate. Hence Corea’s warning. Previously men were denied direct control over the process of procreation; they might give birth symbolically or intervene medically in this process, but these were only simulacra of control. The existence of in vitro fertilization, however, and the distinct possibility of in vitro gestation turn resemblance into reality. Laboratory conception and gestation are a threat to women.

Listening to the Different Voices: Toward a More Poetic Bioethics

In By Blue Ontario’s Shore,Walt Whitman offers his vision of the public role of the poet in a situation of conflict and diversity. The poet, he says, may bring souls together in a way that coercion or a legal code (“paper and seal”) cannot. The poet can bind us together like “the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants” because he has the “eye to pierce the deepest deeps....” [38], pp. 312–313). About the poet Whitman writes: He is no arguer, he is judgment... He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing... He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. ([38], p. 313)

Book Review: Christian Ethics in a Technological AgeChristian Ethics in a Technological Age. By BrockBrian. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. Pp. x + 408.

and worse arguments from that evidence” (582). History can help in the task of interpretation only if the history is done right, and L. argues that history is misused when it is invoked in an effort to try to determine how the Founders would have decided a particular case before the Court today. Instead, we should look to history to better understand the sorts of problems the Founders were trying to resolve. The controversies that prompted the Founders to act (what L. calls “great defining controversies” [587]) help us identify the “core target” of the resulting constitutional text. Focusing on that “core target” allows interpreters to articulate coherent principles that can be applied to future cases, and fidelity to those principles “may require rejection of some of [the Founders’] unexamined but more specific intentions” (589). These essays developing the foundational principles pertinent to the Constitution’s protection of religious liberty—along with L.’s lucid summaries of current constitutional doctrine on the religion clauses and insightful discussion of the role of the Senate in the confirmation of judicial nominees—will be an indispensable resource for legal scholars and practitioners as well as for general readers looking for an accessible point of entry to the sometimes bewildering debates about religion and the Constitution that are a perennial feature of American political discourse. Theological social ethicists might discern in L.’s insistence on understanding religious liberty as liberty an echo of John Courtney Murray’s description of the religion clauses of the First Amendment as “articles of peace” not “articles of faith.” Such readers will find in this collection of L.’s work an outstanding starting point from which to explore their own questions about the constitutional framework for protecting religious liberty in contemporary American society.

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Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Visual Bioethics”

In 1985, Gary Trudeau and the Universal Press Syndicate agreed not to run six installments of the comic strip “Doonesbury” which parodied “The Silent Scream,” an anti-abortion film that showed ultrasound images of an abortion of a 12-weekold fetus taking place. The ultrasound images of the abortion depicted in “The Silent Scream” were accompanied by commentary from a physician–narrator, Bernard Nathanson, who had once performed abortions but had become a staunch opponent of abortion. In fact, the film takes its name from a series of images which Nathanson describes as follows:

From Rescuing Frozen Embryos to Respecting the Limits of Nature: Reframing the Embryo Adoption Debate

fair, H. is clear that his argument is nonfoundational and thus that he purposely eschews arguing in terms of transcendent theological claims. And no one is asking him to take a sectarian Hauerwasian turn, which H. wisely and neatly rejects. But it is fair to ask if Christian analyses of inequality should, as H. does, avoid arguing a public case in terms of the transcendent, universal claims that provide the ultimate basis of human equality. H.’s contextual approach expertly blends disciplines and opens up to view a world of inequality. But the same approach also obscures the theological reasons behind the injustice.